


when king laugh come

by SashaSea (SHCombatalade)



Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 12:04:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6115894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SHCombatalade/pseuds/SashaSea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Andrew sits beside a broken window with a feral smile on his face, and he beckons for Neil before locking them in. “I never,” and there’s a single hitch, a catch of his breath around anger and fear and – and then he’s Andrew again, a whirlwind of noise and motion but for once they take him outside of Neil’s reach and he tries not to notice. “I never asked? Do many people <i>ask</i>, Neil?” He finds the wherewithal to stub out his cigarette into the desk before continuing, hands grasping for answers in the empty air, but he sets his shoulders and leans into Neil’s space like they might be okay. “Really, tell me, in all the years of whatever this is, exactly how many people have ever thought to ask ‘Are you a werewolf?’”</p><p>Neil smells ash and smoke and wants to lean into it; the curls of nicotine in the air taste too much like safety. “Including now? You would be the first.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	when king laugh come

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BurningFairytales](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningFairytales/gifts).



"I feel like this is something you should have told me,” and they both pretend not to notice the way that Andrew’s voice is strained near to breaking, dangerously level and both his hands and his words are quiet. He stands frozen in place, fist pointed limply at the ground, as the fur recedes beneath Neil’s skin like the grass bowing before the wind.

He shrugs around the bones in his shoulders realigning themselves. “You never asked.”

Riko coughs, and they remember where they are. With a slicing motion across his throat, Andrew’s warning of the conversation is either for a delay, or for death; he’s not sure which frightens him more. Neil fingers the rips in his shirt before shrugging off the loss, zipping his jacket to his chin to disguise them.

The bus ride back to campus lasts an eternity; Neil’s tongue feels heavy and useless in his mouth (you’ve already said enough). He showers twice after changing out of the clothes he’d been given, but he still smells the lingering traces of turpentine on his skin – it makes him restless, all too eager to follow Nicky’s ‘he wants to talk to you.’ Of course he does. Later, when he knocks on the door at the end of the hall, he thinks that maybe he should have run when he had the chance.

Andrew sits beside a broken window with a feral smile on his face, and he beckons for Neil before locking them in. “I never,” and there’s a single hitch, a catch of his breath around anger and fear and – and then he’s Andrew again, a whirlwind of noise and motion but for once they take him _outside_ of Neil’s reach and he tries not to notice. “I never _asked_? Do many people _ask,_ Neil?” He finds the wherewithal to stub out his cigarette into the desk before continuing, hands grasping for answers in the empty air, but he sets his shoulders and leans into Neil’s space like they might be okay. “Really, tell me, in all the years of _whatever this is_ , exactly how many people have _ever_ thought to ask ‘Are you a werewolf?’”

Neil smells ash and smoke and wants to lean into it; the curls of nicotine in the air taste too much like safety. “Including now? You would be the first.”

“Fuck,” Andrew spits, lighting a second cigarette in hands that pointedly do not tremble, but he turns away to pace the length of the room, dodging broken glass and blood drops with delicate steps and not once glancing over like he should be worried to have Neil at his back. When he returns, the only sign that anything is amiss is the way that his hair is more than its usual tousled, obvious marks from his fingers tugging through it. “Neil,” he begins calmly, too calmly, “are you a werewolf?”

He shrugs, a one-shouldered gesture that still twinges with phantom pain despite years of time and less than natural healing. “Sort of.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Andrew mutters.

* * *

He was ten when it happened.

It was summer, the air hot and sticky in a way that meant he just _couldn’t_ sleep no matter how hard he tried, tossing and turning and even the open window, night breeze cool against his skin, did nothing to help. He doesn’t remember ever looking at the clock but he thinks it was about three in the morning, and he was just about to give up and go downstairs and watch a movie when he heard his dad’s voice. “Junior,” he called, “ _Junior_.”

“Hrmm?” His voice sounded hot and sticky like the air, syrupy like a half-dream.

“Junior,” the voice called again, a stage whisper directly outside his door. When he stumbled downstairs, barefoot and bleary-eyed, he followed the shadow of a man that led from the kitchen to the backyard and called to him with his father’s voice. Questions died unspoken on his tongue; he had learned better than to question him.

“Sir?” He finally managed to ask just as his feet touched down onto the cool cement patio, toes wiggling, and then the light from the full moon shifted and his father turned and –

“ _Junior_ ,” the creature snarled in his father’s voice, and maybe he blinked then because it’s suddenly _right there_ , hot breath on his face and the light of the moon glinted against white, dagger-like teeth. “They want you,” and then the voice was a growl, low in its throat, and his lips pulled back like a threat and –

He looked like a man, or he _did_ , but now his face is… well, now he looked like a _wolf_ , only that shouldn’t be possible, thick dark fur and a long cruel muzzle and “You are _mine_ ,” he panted heavily, and then he attacked –

“Nathaniel!” He heard his mother’s voice from the house, deep and desperate. “No, _no_!” and then she was there, stumbling over her speed across the lawn, a fist to the creature’s skull and then she was fending it off with –

 _The sword hangs below the portrait of his mother’s grandfather, in the office. “Your great-grandfather,” she tells him, six years old and finally asking, “was commended after the first World War. This sword was for ceremonial purposes only, not for fighting; it’s coated in silver,” and she draws it, just an inch, to show her son how it all but gleams_ –

The sword touched the beast and it howled in pain, rearing back and it tore its teeth from his neck, his shoulder, right where his collarbone is and he felt the skin and bone _snap_ –

The next thing he remembers is the private clinic and the way that no one will meet his gaze.

Then he remembers the whispers and the way that people flinch whenever he moves.

Then he remembers a long time and a locked room and a series of specialists who draw his blood every day without telling him why.

Then he remembers the full moon rising over the river and he has just enough time to think that it has been only a month and he’s still in the hospital and how the gaping wound had healed within days but everyone still treats him like he’s dying, and then he can’t think of anything at all except his bones shifting and hair sprouting and he howls and howls and howls.

They release him from the hospital the next day, but no one will come within ten feet of him, and when he gets home and hugs his mom she goes stiff and afraid in his arms.

Two days after that there’s an Exy match, and then he and his mother start to run.

* * *

He meets Riko and he all but panics into a shift the way he hasn’t since puberty, terrified that the man will see some trace of who he used to be in his eyes. He doesn’t worry that Riko will smell it.

The two branches of the family were separated by more than just a country – Ichirou had the pack. Riko had Exy. The younger brother stood to inherit fame and fortune, but never the family business… nor the bite that went along with it. From what he’s been able to piece together over the past months, Neil doesn’t think he was ever meant to inherit it either.

Like Kevin, the only emotion is his eyes is disdain. Neil breathes in the rush of turpentine that he hasn’t smelled since that day at the court, and feels the wolf rise to the challenge.

* * *

“The sob story about your parents. None of that was true.”

Sometimes Neil isn’t sure he knows what is anymore. “Some of it was,” and he stops and starts, feeling truth cross his tongue. It burns, foreign and unfamiliar, and he swallows it down to bury alongside the other secrets he’s accumulated over his lives. There’s only so much he can give. “I was on the run. I did stay because I was tired. Riko and his family could be a problem.”

His eyes narrow at the mention of the Moriyamas, like he’s putting the pieces together in his head. “You’re an unnecessary liability,” and the words are sharp as the blade that appears in his hand. “Moriyama could order you to kill us all.” There’s an unspoken end to his sentence that sounds suspiciously like a knife in the gut, a whisper of _unless we kill you first_. Neil’s **tired**.

“Fuck Moriyama,” and the manic burst of joy across Andrew’s face reminds him of the instability the drugs offer; for all that Andrew is fighting them, he’s not going to win. He probably can’t be killed by anything in this room, but it’s not a theory he wants to test. “I don’t submit to him. I was never his, my-” It clenches in his gut: Horror. Revulsion. Panic. He hasn’t spoken the words aloud since the attack, and the weight of honesty is like a stone punching through his organs. “Someone else did this.”

Andrew stares, eyes sharp but face vacant, at him for some time, considering. _I’ll still solve you_ , he’d promised, and Neil had all but fled from the court; Andrew smelled like gunpowder and wheatgrass, except when he lied. Lies always smelled sour. That night, that promise, hadn’t left an acrid taste in his mouth. Andrew had spoken the truth. “Well,” he finally says, and there’s an unfamiliar tone to his voice – genuineness. “That’s an entirely different story.”

The room smells like hot ash and handguns and Neil wants to, _needs to_ , leave – he needs to go across the hall and slide into the bed that smells only like him and a day’s worth of regrets. He always knew that his time at Palmetto State was limited, but it seems even more so now; Andrew knows. It’s only a matter of time before the rest of the Foxes do as well, and when they do –

He won’t be around to find out what.

“Are you going to tell the others?” He asks it in German. He hadn’t meant to. The language shift gives context to the question: are you going to tell _your people_. If Neil knows anything in that moment, it’s that Andrew wouldn’t willingly talk to the upperclassman even for this.

“Don’t be stupid,” but there’s no kindness in the words. It’s not a courtesy. “Who would believe me? Werewolves, _fuck_.” A sweep of his hand has the last of the books on the desk tossed to the ground. Neil forces himself not to jump at the sound, too loud in the too small space (he needs to get out).

The others are sure to have heard, are sure to come to a response. It may not have been a dismissal, but Neil takes it as one. “Well,” he says when he turns to leave, only because there’s a cagey feeling in his chest and he needs to let just enough go to calmly walk out (and once he does, run and run and _run_ ). “I guess I’m not as boring as you thought I was.”

It’s met with silence. There’s a darkness on Andrew’s face then, a promise of violence, like he isn’t enraged at the suggestion but at the truth of it. The threat comes like a thunderclap, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment where it Neil is not the hunter, but the cornered prey. He blinks. Andrew looks absolutely _livid_. “Get out.”

He does, and he burrows under the blankets in the bed that smells only like himself and tunes out the world to the sound of his pounding heartbeat.

* * *

The banquet is an unmitigated disaster.

It falls apart before it’s even fully begun, when they spot the orange draped chairs with only a flimsy folding table of space between them and the Ravens (because of course they would sit them together. It’s hardly a matter of safety or sanity when it’s good television). Neil sits beside Kevin without being prompted, pressing the line of their legs together like they had done on Kathy’s show – Andrew blinks at him twice from his seat, probably remembering the same event, in a warning to keep it together.

The thing is, he does. He manages to sit in silence for as long as he can, ignoring the words and the burning stench of hatred that rolls off the other team in waves, until –

 _Just like his mother_ , he hears, and he smells gasoline mixed with the burnt rubber and turpentine that he’s come to associate with Riko. He allows himself the smallest of snarls, and he goes for the throat. The Ravens drop their jaws as Dan drops her head in laughter. “Matt,” and there’s genuine joy in her tone; for weeks now Neil has fought the spark of warmth he feels in his chest when he’s around his teammates. It feels too much like the down to the bones belonging he’s never experienced, something that his inhuman instincts want to put a name he is not ready for to. “Get Coach.” Jean and Riko glare daggers, though Jean’s are in defense. He looks at Kevin, and Neil hears the word _Butcher_ and then it all comes to pieces.

He doesn’t remember Kevin leaving. He only remembers the bone-chilling terror on his face and the way his voice caught on a moan. “No,” he whispered. “No.” (Not here, Neil tells him in Nathaniel’s voice, and it’s enough).

He doesn’t remember moving tables. He only remembers the way he’s suddenly that much closer to clean air and open space and the way his legs _ache_ with the need to escape.

He remembers the way the Foxes fall into position around him, and the way he doesn’t flinch to have them at his back. He holds on to that feeling – the warmth in his chest like he’s drunk, slow and safe and heavy, that spreads out to his limbs when he realizes the whole team has come to his defense – when he follows Jean into the locker room.

The thing about Riko, he is coming to learn, is that he is used to being obeyed (King, they call him. King. He is only human). He turns on Neil with the same expectation, using his weight and his words to beat Neil into submission – it doesn’t work. “He didn’t have one,” he snarls. Riko points a finger at his own face and it takes everything Neil has not to shred the skin from his skull. He might understand a world where the Butcher obeyed a Moriyama (he would _have_ to. The fact that his father was a werewolf meant that he’d been bitten, meant there was a wolf whose will would override any of his own thought), but it wouldn’t be this one. It wouldn’t even be this one’s uncle.

“Learn your place,” Riko warns in the quiet moments before Matt arrives (warmth flares in his chest again, a word he’s never considered on the tip of his tongue, but he buries both. He can’t afford the distraction). The command is like an ineffectual slap.

He smiles. “From what I can tell,” and it spurs him forward to see the way Jean recoils, fear in his eyes, “the one who needs to learn their place is you, _Jirou_.” Riko’s lips pull back from his teeth, halfway a sneer, but there’s a satisfying hint of unease in his stare as he realizes exactly what he’s facing. He must know enough about the main branch to want it. “I bet it eats you up inside, that I got what you want most. Even more than the game.” He feels Matt step beside him, ready to separate them, and Neil growls. “I can’t wait to take that from you, too.”

It takes half a minute for Riko to speak, and while his voice is calm there’s a frenzied glint to his eyes. “Later you will come to me, throat bared, begging for my forgiveness.”

He smells sour.

* * *

On the bus ride home ( _home_ ), Andrew spends the majority of the time enraged at Riko’s suggestion. “Your _pet_ ,” he spits; Kevin doesn’t respond. He’s barely acknowledged anything since they left, aside from the two second stare he’d given Neil that ended in another quiet _no_. “Me? If anyone here needs to be put on a leash, it’s Josten.” Matt nods his head in agreement.

The adrenaline is starting to wear off, and the bus smells like home; it relaxes him, and Neil allows of those slow, real smiles that he hasn’t felt in a long time. “You’re welcome to try,” he throws back.

* * *

The next day, he meets Kevin at the court for the second time.

“Tell me you’re not him,” he searches for the answer he’s already found in Neil’s face. “Tell me you’re not Nathaniel.” Neil allows the shift to come fully for the first time in eight years, and Kevin moans. “No,” he says. “No, you died.”

Neil shrugs. “Most do.”

(Later, Kevin stops him with a sorrowful look. _You were supposed to make Court_ , he says, and neither of them know if he means Neil or Nathaniel – it’s over for both of them. He allows them that single moment to grieve, and then the next time they’re on the court together he works Neil ten times as hard as he used to. _Now that I know what you’re capable of_ , he grins.)

* * *

Of all the Foxes, it’s Renee who most sets Neil at unease. He can’t explain it – he tries. She’s too good. He can’t figure her out. He doesn’t understand her thing with Andrew. He tells the others a new lie every day because he can’t tell them that she doesn’t smell right.

Neil knows the Foxes by smell better than he’s ever known anyone (except his mother. She’d smelled like salt water and curry, but then she smelled only like gasoline): Andrew is wheatgrass and a recently fired pistol, Aaron and Nicky lean more to pine trees and fresh, crusty bread. Matt and Dan are a combination of sunshine, black coffee, and flannel sheets. Kevin is cherry blossoms and peat moss. Seth had been cut grass. Allison is mostly sadness now.

But Renee is –

Renee smells like the faint traces of the rest of the team left behind, and nothing of her own.

When he finally spends time with her, one on one, she smells like breakfast with Dan and like Neil himself.

* * *

It hits him like a panic attack, the roiling of his stomach and the urge to run (and run and run and _run_ ), to get out and get away and danger, danger, danger. He doesn’t understand the feeling until he walks into the kitchen and smells wheatgrass and gunpowder and _fear_. He manages to gasp for Aaron, but can’t explain his urgency beyond a single word. “Andrew,” he says, and it spurs them both into action.

They kick in the door and his vision goes blurry at the edges, so he doesn’t see Aaron move until it’s too late to stop him (not that he would. If anything he would join in, flaying the skin piece by piece until Drake is an unrecognizable mess, but that would be the point of no turning back for him, the switch between monster and man, and there are _other priorities_ ). He thinks he hears Andrew say his name, but he turns and –

“Heel,” Andrew is saying on repeat, the words caught up in sour laughter. “ _Heel_.”

( _Sit_ , he’d told him roughly, that first day they’d rearranged the locker room for their groups, and he’d laughed at the glare it earned him. _Down boy_ , he’d warned after a game when Neil had leaned too close to an opposing player.)

 _Heel_ , he orders, and it hurts.

* * *

Neil walks in to Evermore knowing that he will not walk out the same.

It’s for his pack. It’s worth it.

* * *

Coach picks him up from the airport and all Neil remembers is following a familiar smell. He doesn’t remember that he has anything he should be afraid of until they’re locked into a car together on the interstate, halfway to home. Neil blinks and two miles of road vanish. He doesn’t think he fell asleep.

(He might have. It smells too much like the comfort of home in the car, and his cuts burn and his muscles burn and the sun burns and he looks around again for Jean before remembering Jean isn’t there. He feels the loss in his chest worse than any of his injuries combined. The first time they met, Riko had been surprised – the second time he’d known exactly how to use Neil’s true nature as a weapon against him.)

He sees Kevin with bruises on his face and can’t find it in him to be concerned; Kevin smells like shame and fear and his teammates. He smells like the bruises came from in-fighting. “I should have known,” he tells Kevin in French. He’d meant to speak English, but his tongue can’t remember the words anymore. He and Jean spoke entirely in French, whenever they could. “Peat moss.”

Kevin stares after the coach, expressionless. “God damn you.”

* * *

The first thing Andrew does when he sees Neil is pause, studying him with an intensity that the medication had hidden; just like that time in his dorm room, back when this all started, there’s a prickling at the back of his neck that tells Neil he’s being hunted. “Silver,” he says finally, voice flat. “Not a myth then.”

He doesn’t say anything else to Neil for a while.

(Later, on the roof, he tosses a casual _I hate you_ that reeks of a lie before he throws Neil’s keys off the side. “Fetch.”)

* * *

(The next day, he doesn’t apologize, but he gives him another key.)

* * *

The day after that, Neil puts up his hands to stop Andrew and Andrew doesn’t react. He knows what Neil is, knows what he’s capable of, but doesn’t bat an eye when he grabs a werewolf by the throat - it’s a gesture Neil knows has caused him to lash out at anyone who attempts it; instead, he listens. “ _Sit_.”

Neil sits.

Then he asks about knives and gets his first glimpse of the real Renee – he has a word, right at the edge of his tongue, but it’s impossible. Renee smells like locker room and the couch she sits on. She smells like everything around her and nothing of herself.

She tells him a story about the other girls that didn’t make it, that didn’t survive.

Renee smells like those other girls.

* * *

“Show me your scars.”

He thinks, in some way, he knew this was coming. Andrew had spent too much time examining the bruises that followed him home from Evermore only to disappear within a day to not be curious about the injuries that didn’t – the marks from the cuffs stayed, and the cuts from the knives. The tattoo seemed to grow darker. Still, even knowing it was coming could not fully prepare him for it.

Andrew’s fingers skim the shapeless patch of scar tissue at his side, catch against the rim of the bullet hole. He follows the lines of the iron seven times, counting the dots on each pass. He spends the most time on the angry, jagged mark at his neck and collarbone. “These are not from a life on the run,” he observes, expressionless.

Neil understands. “I wasn’t born this way. Those were all from before.” He chokes out the word of a time he can no longer remember – _before_. “All the others are from silver blades, they heal and scar normally.”

A soft touch dances across the ragged tear at his clavicle, only to end with a thumb jabbed into the hollow of his throat. “And this one?” It’s different than the others – it’s still red, angry, like it’s fresh. It’s always been that way. The others heal into silvery lines that trace his flesh, but this one – The One – looks out of place and almost alive. Andrew asks like he already knows the answer. “Was this one from before?”

“No.” Neil leans into the touch. “It wasn’t from after, either.”

* * *

For the first time in his life (in this lifetime, at least. Once upon a time he was a small boy with breakable bones and a breakable spirit, but then he learned the truth of when they called his father a monster. He doesn’t think he was ever really that boy) the too-thick press of bodies by the bar doesn’t bother him. He wants to tell himself it’s because he knows what can hurt him now, and it isn’t this – he wants to, but the words taste sour before they’re even formed. Andrew is a press of safety as his side, and that’s enough.

“Why does Roland think you’re tying me up?” he asks, if only because he wants to provoke an attack. He has no reason to feel so cornered, defensive, caged in at the table with his back to the door and the car keys burning a hole in his pocket. No reason, but he does. Instead of looking for a cause, he gives himself a reason.

Andrew doesn’t react the way he’d hoped.

(Later, he thinks that maybe Andrew knew what he was looking for, and purposefully denied it.)

“You hate me.” He doesn’t say it like a question but he means it like one, quiet confusion turning the words up in the corners – he knows it’s not true, not really, but he knows with equal surety that it can’t mean the opposite. He _can’t_. The first moment of truth between them had come in an explosion of violence as Neil, or at least the beast that wore Neil’s clothes, his face, had thrown an unsuspecting Riko halfway through a wall. Andrew knows what he is, he can’t possibly –

Neil would think he’d had enough of monsters.

* * *

The first time he’s alone with Dan after Evermore, she doesn’t speak to him; instead, she looks. She traces the cuts on his face with her eyes, the stark lines of the number that looks blacker and blacker every time he manages to face his reflection. She lingers for a moment over the watercolor of bruises, now entirely healed, that had painted seventy percent of his skin. Her last focus is his eyes (she looks him in the eye and she _stares_ and the every part of him tells him that he needs to look away, to show _respect_ ).

“They tried to claim you.”

He jerks at the words, eyes flying from the floor to her face – maybe it’s the phrasing, but she says it like she _knows_. She moves into his space then, slowly and deliberately, and he can’t move. He feels rooted to the ground before her, compelled.

“They can’t have you.” Her arms come around him at the words, squeezing the promise tight into him, forcing it down to his bones. Once upon a time, he was a small boy in a world of monsters and the creature he knew as his father ripped a similar mark of ownership into his flesh – Dan’s feels like strength, and safety, and home. “You’re a _Fox_.” She tells him, gaze unwavering against his. The feeling of belonging ignites in his chest again, and he’s long since given up trying to deny it – these people, this team, they are _his._ And he is theirs. In another language, he might have called them pack (he doesn’t. He calls them family instead).

He burns the reminder into his brain.

* * *

Katelyn smells like green apples and old cars, and Neil thinks that in another lifetime they might have been friends – he doesn’t think much of her until she shifts her space to include him, instantly welcoming, and never once smells of unease. There’s a quiet bravery about her.

She says she loves Aaron and it smells like the truth.

* * *

At the airport, Andrew finds his way to Neil’s side; wheatgrass and gunpowder. It smells like –

He watches airplanes land and ignores the way his instincts urge him to lean closer. “You don’t look like a Nathaniel,” Andrew tells him; he takes it as a compliment. He’s never wanted to be a Nathaniel anyway. The conversation is too casual to be anything but, and for the first time in a long time (he can’t remember when safety smelled like other people) Neil wants to run until the only scent he can find is his own.

There’s only one gift left to offer. “Abram,” he corrects slowly, turning the word over and over in his mouth; it tastes rough with disuse. He’d left Nathaniel dead and buried, but Abram had made the trip stuffed at the bottom of bags and in the quietest moments in the middle of the night. The only person to say the name aloud since he was born had been his mother; he can count the number of times on one hand. It was what she called him the day he came home from the hospital. It was what she called him the day she told him to run.

Abram is all the truth he has left.

Andrew nods his acceptance.

* * *

Neil meets Andrew’s stare over the roar of the reporters’ questions, a silent request - he waits for the nod of permission. Andrew holds a hand out to take Neil’s helmet from him, wordless; the expression on his face is the same as the one when he absently plays with knives. When Neil asked about his scars. It’s the expression of someone who knows all too well the ease at which a human life can be lost – he hands the helmet off to Renee and shoves Neil with a hand at the scruff of his neck.

It’s also the expression of someone who knows the ease with which a life can be _taken_.

The press lose their minds when he reveals the tattoo, and he allows just enough to the wolf to come to the surface to have them stepping back, giving him his space; he hears Matt’s bark of laughter in support (the same delight had been in Dan’s voice, pure and radiant, at the banquet. It leaves that too-tight pack feeling under his ribs, and he feels stronger than ever to have them at his back). “I did spend the holidays at Evermore,” he confirms, and keeps his voice bored as he denounces it.

“Are you signing with Edgar Allen?” one asks, gesturing to the number below his eyes. He raises a hand to it as if considering it for the first time.

“Oh,” and it’s shrugged off as an afterthought. “That.” He releases it to adjust the grip on the stick in his hands, turning the angle so the orange and white is facing the camera head-on; it’s a declaration. “In Japanese, the number four is pronounced like the word for death. It’s supposed to be unlucky. I guess now when people look at my face – well, if they’re from Japan at least – they’ll be reminded of what’s coming.” He grins for the cameras, all teeth, and he’s never felt more in control. “But what do I know.”

It wouldn’t take a werewolf to hear a pin drop in the silence.

“I’m not from Japan.”

* * *

Allison lunges for Aaron, and then Andrew throws himself at her.

And Neil –

Neil was raised on violence much worse than this, learned to walk with a gun at his head, and he’s lost track of the number of bones he has broken that didn’t belong to him. Even before he had an animal’s nature warring his own, the senselessness of causing pain was familiar to him. He watches Allison, all soft skin and hard edges, strike Aaron across the face once. Twice. She has a hell of a swing.

He watches Andrew scrambling over, arms around her neck.

He’s frozen in place – for too long now he’s been strung up on razor taut wires, tugged between threats to his family from all directions. It’s become second nature for him, the pressure in his chest, the constant prickle of danger at his back when he places himself between yet another blow. If it were any other moment, Neil knows he would throw himself in front of whatever danger approached.

But this is –

This is family against each other, the two factions of the Foxes finally splitting, and Neil is teetering on the chasm between – he’s always been one foot on either side of the divide. He could step in now and end this, easily, but he can’t –

He can’t –

He can’t _choose_ (he made his choice. He’s a Fox, for better or worse).

“Andrew,” he uses only his words; he doesn’t trust his hands not to break if he gets skin and bone beneath them. “Stop.”

His words are enough, especially when he uses them as a weapon. He turns months’ worth of promise and truth into a blade, and he throws himself onto it for his teammates.

(The battle ends with no winners. The two sides retreat with threats to stay away, and he can feel the world fracture beneath his feet.)

* * *

Andrew is afraid of heights; they meet on the roof anyway. Andrew was afraid of heights the first time they made their way up here, too, and nothing has changed (everything has changed). “I told you,” he says around shaking hands and a cigarette, “that if anyone needed a leash, it was you.”

Neil drops to sit beside him, legs dangling over the edge. “And I told you,” the air is crisp and the roof smells like nicotine and wheatgrass and gunshots; the combination smells safer than it should. He likes that the farthest corners of his life are starting to smell like the Foxes. Like home. “That you were welcome to try.”

“I hate you,” Andrew says unconvincingly. Neil had told him once how lies turned the air in his mouth sour, and now Andrew makes a point of half-truths whenever possible, just to watch Neil’s nose twitch in discomfort.

“Every time you say that,” and he does lean closer then, towards the smell of destruction and new growth, “I believe you less.” This time it’s Andrew who looks like he’s smelled something sour, face wrinkling in displeasure, and he threatens to push Neil off the side. Everything is sour and safety, and Neil smiles. “I’d drag you down with me.”

(It’s not Andrew who takes him down that night, but Aaron. Neil would find it in him to be angry if he wasn’t so pleased to see the twins actually fight for something.)

* * *

(The next day, neither of them apologizes, but they trade insincere insults and cigarettes in the parking lot.

Neil makes it to ninety-one, and it feels like a victory.)

* * *

The day of his birthday – his _real_ birthday, Nathaniel’s birthday – dawns half-forgotten; it’s not a day he’s celebrated in years. He marks it as another year survived, and nothing more.

Someone else marks it for him.

He opens his locker to a rush of blood and the panicked noises of his teammates; all he can hear is the sudden thump-thump of his heart in overdrive, the way his body is screaming from every nerve ending to run (and run and run and _run_ ). The blood is not human, he knows that. What worries him more, what terrifies him on a level he can’t understand, has no frame of reference for, is the word ringing in his ears. _Junior_.

Only one person has ever called him that.

 _Junior_ , he called that night, luring him out of bed and into a nightmare.

 _Junior_ , the voice had mocked when he caught up with them outside Portland.

 _Junior_ , Aaron sneers, still angry, and he breaks.

He manages to make it to a bathroom stall before he gives too much away, and he digs long tracks into his thighs. He’s been Neil Josten for so long now that he’d almost managed to convince himself that he _wasn’t_ a monster. He is not Neil Josten, Number Ten, Striker; he’s the Butcher’s legacy. They heal all too quickly, but it keeps him from turning on anything – or anyone – else.

* * *

The next time it all gets to be too much, he sits on the curb and he thinks about running.

( _You’re a fucking mess_ , Andrew told him once. It’s one of their quiet, corner conversations where they both stop pretending long enough for Andrew to ask whatever questions he has about werewolves. It’s not invasive, doesn’t leave the fear-burn of truth in his mouth after. It feels more like science class than secrets. “Yeah, well,” and the words brush him the wrong way; he’s tired. “It’s been hard since my mom… Wolves don’t do well alone.”

Andrew wraps a hand around the back of his neck, grip uncomfortably tight, and shakes him. “You’re not alone anymore,” he growls. “Remember?”)

Instead, he pulls out his phone and he makes a call.

* * *

Later, on the roof, Andrew gives him another key.

He has never had a place that felt safe, never had anything he didn’t carry in a bag across his back – since coming to Palmetto State, he has a key chain full of ways to run and places to run to. He has four different places that he considers home (a tenuous, timid feeling that grows more tangible by the day). One of them is a person. “Stop looking at me like that,” Andrew warns, and takes the lit cigarette from his hand. “I am not your answer.”

That might be true. He might be the question instead.

( _What does Andrew have to do with this? Everything that matters_.)

“I hate you,” Andrew tells him.

Neil smiles. It smells sour and soft. “You’re a terrible liar.”

When Andrew kisses him, it both is and isn’t a surprise – they’ve been running their whole lives, two complex circles that met at an intersect and slowly intertwined; they’ve been running circles round each other since the first time they met, and he finally sees where that might lead. Andrew kisses him like he wants to bruise him, wants to lay claim with a mark sucked into his lips. Neil thinks he would be okay letting him. “Tell me no,” and it doesn’t sound like a command – it sounds like a challenge.

Neil is going to lose.

* * *

Kengo collapses at work. Neil knows what that means – there’s an end, and it’s close.

* * *

The first time Andrew pulls him down, he does so with a hand at his neck.

It’s something instinctual for him now, the way he presses against the thumb in the hollow of his throat; Andrew’s hand has found its way there more often than he can remember, the length of his palm stretched across the jagged scar at his collarbone. He grips it like he’s trying to smooth the skin, burn away anger and redness and leave an exact imprint of his own handprint behind. It should go against both set of instincts, man and beast, in Neil to allow it.

He can’t remember a time that someone ever laid a hand on him without the intent to harm – he’d never had friends before, and certainly never his parents. He flinches away from physical touch like he does from the truth, because both are things that have been used to strip the flesh from his body. And yet, when Andrew presses him down with an arm that has more knives sheathed against it than he knows of, it doesn’t feel like a threat.

It feels like a promise.

* * *

The first time Andrew lets Neil touch him, he guides his hands by the wrist into his hair.

Neil reaches out, drags shaking fingers through blond hair, and immediately freezes. The last time he touched someone, he was on the court and he threw them into a wall. The time before that, he broke a dealer’s wrist at Evermore. For as long as he has been alive, Neil has trusted his hands to do one thing: keep him alive. He buries his hands into Andrew’s hair and he thinks it might be the first time that he’s ever touched someone like this – he doesn’t know how to be gentle.

(Andrew doesn’t know what it feels like, to have someone be gentle.)

He pulls his hands away like he’s been burned, tucking his fingers into his fists and squeezing tight. When he manages to open his eyes, it’s to meet Andrew’s quiet, considering stare. “You can’t break me,” he promises.

“I don’t want to take the risk.”

(Andrew takes it as a challenge, to see just how far he can push Neil’s control.

Neil loses.)

* * *

“Don’t look at me like that” Andrew warns him again, eyes closed and voice lazy; they’re the only ones on the bus. “I am not your answer.” (Of course not, Neil wants to tell him. There’s a countdown on his phone that has finally reached zero and he doesn’t think he’ll ever have another chance. Of course not. You’re the reason.)

“Let me go,” he says instead. There’s a prickling at the back of his neck that he can’t quite explain, some electricity in the air that is telling him danger, danger, danger – in another lifetime, it would have told him to run (instead, now it tells him what he would come back for). He doesn’t know what will happen before the day is over, but he knows he wants to face it alone. He won’t risk the others’ lives, not for him. “Let me fight for myself.”

(When the time comes, he doesn’t fight. He says his goodbyes and he walks to his death, a smile on his face.)

* * *

The first thing they do is remove the tattoo.

They burn it from his face with a car cigarette lighter, the knife-slice of pain across his skull lasting far longer than the blister; those heal almost instantly, skin fresh and raw and new, and then they burn him again (and again and again and _again_ ). By the time they move on, the number four has been seared from his memory, as well as his flesh. The reminder of death remains.

They set the lighter for a second charge, burning it down to cool metal on his face. By now the burns are lasting longer and longer, blisters on top of blisters (he can feel the way everything stretches and pulls like he’s coming apart. He heals, but not under this constant torture.)

Lola knows what he is. He remembers her being in the room at the hospital, silent in the corner, as the endless stream of doctors waded in and out in confusion. It doesn’t surprise him when she pulls a small blade that gleams in the moonlight, even less when she slides it into the softness of his cheek and he feels the angry, allergic jolt. The next stripe catches on his cheekbone and he can feel it all the way down his arm. She draws careless figures up and down the length of both arms, and across the lines of his face.

Somewhere before they get on the interstate, Neil loses the ability to scream.

(By the time he figures out where they’re headed, he only hopes they kill him upon arrival. He doesn’t know how much more he can take of the scrape of silver against his bones.)

The two – three? – weeks he’d spent at Evermore had been some of the worst of his life. They’d surrounded him with Jean from the moment he arrived, scent and sound and safety, until it was as close as he’d ever felt to a family bond. They had sliced the feeling out of muscle and flesh the first night, let it heal by forced morning. During daytime his world was narrowed down to only Jean, and at night it was torture and betrayal.

But this is –

This is something else entirely.

They arrive at his childhood home and all Neil can smell is blood and cooked skin, and all of it is his. Every part of his body _aches_ with the low-level poison of the metal. Then he hears his father’s voice, a low rumble that calls him Junior, and –

And he drops to the ground before he knows what’s happening, a whimper in the back of his throat, turning his chin up to expose the vulnerable part of his neck and –

He _yields_.

His father doesn’t hesitate, just hands him the knife and orders him where to put it. Nathaniel digs hot silver into the flesh of his own thighs without question, and his father laughs and laughs and laughs.

(Later, in the basement, there’s a moment of time where the tides turn; Nathaniel hears footsteps and smells gunpowder – and it turns his nose because it’s wrong, it’s _wrong_ – and the worried ripple from his father’s men, and in the time it takes for the door to the basement to fly off its hinges he’s found the strength to shift. He drags his claws through Lola’s chest, fingertips catching on bone, as the bullet exits his father’s eye.

He doesn’t care who comes down the stairs, just that he is the only one they find left alive.)

* * *

The door swings open and Nathaniel – Neil? He doesn’t know who he is anymore – feels his body suddenly remember how to breathe. He hears them long before he sees them, soft whimpers and staggered heartbeats, and then he opens his eyes and sees the (Horrified. Relieved. Blank.) faces of his family – they’re here. They’re okay. They’re alive. The hotel room smells of fresh bread and flannel sheets and peat moss and hot cider and _home_ and he wants to –

He doesn’t smell gunshots.

(He’d smelled gunshots back in the basement, right when everything went to hell, and for a moment he’d been struck dumb by that _feeling_ in his chest.)

“Where’s-” He starts to ask. He _thinks_ he starts to ask. Eyes go wide and eyebrows draw in concern and he thinks that maybe, just maybe, there’s nothing left in him after the screaming. Nicky hides his face in Aaron’s shoulder. “Where’s-” He starts to ask, but the way everyone looks at him has him thinking his mouth isn’t moving. Or maybe it’s not human.

There’s a terrible scuffle right past the door, and his legs all but give out beneath him; Andrew’s shove sends him to his knees (he follows after, still silent). He drags a hand along the many injuries, rough over stitches and burns, gentler in the places that are the angry red of a silver blade (and it _hurts_ , that even after everything Andrew is treating him like he’s something worthy). He doesn’t deserve – “I’m sorry.”

“Say it again and I’ll kill you,” and there’s murder in Andrew’s voice, and something far more deadly – the fragility frightens him. Andrew has never been (has always been) fragile; he clenches his hands into painful fists to keep from grabbing hold, because he doesn’t trust his hands anymore. Stuart might have been the one to put a bullet through the Butcher, but it was Nathaniel’s burned arms that tore the others to ribbons. At the hospital, most of the blood on his hands had not been his own.

It guts him, that after everything he’s done to keep them safe – keep _Andrew_ safe – he’s ultimately the one to break him.

“Am I at ninety-four yet?”

“You are at _one hundred_ ,” Andrew snarls, and Nathaniel hears the words that skate between them, and the tips of his fingers close the gap to rest against his temples

From the corner of his eye he sees Abby move in. “Get away from us,” Andrew’s voice is shaking with the effort to keep himself together, and suddenly the skin beneath his too-light touch is hot, too hot, and that small point of contact isn’t enough. Nathaniel wants to crawl across the floor and into his lap, wants to trace a lifetime’s worth of inevitability into his skin with his fingers, his mouth, wants to taste him and find out what forever feels like on his tongue. He  _wants_.

Against his will, one hand reaches out to brush two fingers against the heavy drumbeat of Andrew’s heart; he can hear it pounding in his ears, can hear his own heart slow to pace it, but it’s not enough. It’s not _enough_. He wants to _feel_ it, wants the anchor of it, wants to smooth it calmer in apology; he wants to know there’s still enough of Neil – Nathaniel? – left in him for this. He presses two fingers to the ribcage, and he feels the way the heartbeat skips.

“My father is dead,” he murmurs; Andrew tightens his grip on his chin, tilting his head up again to see the looping scar against his neck. He’d never said, but by now he had to know what that meant – the Butcher is dead, and he is _free_. The only creature whose will he submits to is his own. _You’re not alone anymore_ , he remembers, and he begs for permission to stay.

It’s not only Andrew’s voice who tells him that he’s not going anywhere.

* * *

When the time finally comes to talk to the others, there’s only one truth left.

“A werewolf,” Nicky says, like he doesn’t have the evidence in front of him; Neil had been too exhausted, to wrecked for a full shift, but he’d managed just enough to be convincing. Kevin’s support had done the rest. The others are still silent, faces ranging from unbelieving to unsettled (to blankness, for Andrew, who still won’t let Neil out of his sight like he’s afraid he won’t be there when he looks back). “And all this time I thought he was fucking with me.”

“Kevin?” He knows that Kevin had tried telling Andrew once, too, before Neil ever signed with the Foxes.

Nicky’s lips pinch. “Erik.” When he doesn’t switch to German, Neil knows that they – the Foxes, at least. Maybe not as individuals, but as a team – are going to be okay. “He used to tell me stories about werewolves and swear to me they were real.” The faded memory of one of his smiles crosses his face. “Guess he was right.”

Coach had taken the news in the same manner he took everything else his reckless kids could throw at him. He’d taken one look at the fur and the fangs and sighed a familiar, “Christ, Neil,” before ducking out of the room. He returned ten minutes later with food.

And everyone else – Aaron was the only one who looked like he’d prefer Neil have come home in pieces, but he’d been that way since long before he knew. The others treated Neil like the only thing that had changed was that finally knew what he was running from, and like they wanted to be the ones to protect him from it. It takes a full day of too many bodies crammed too close together, the stringent odor of concern threatening to smother him, before he finally snaps. “Why are you all still here?” he snarls, and they might flinch but they don’t look afraid of him. He hates it. “Why are you still being like this, when you know I’m-” He can’t get the words out.

Support comes from the unexpected ally. Allison cups his face unflinchingly, and begins smoothly applying the makeup to disguise his wounds (the burns were close to gone now, but the slices were inflamed. He wanted them gone). “Your father was a monster,” she correctly interprets his silence; there’s steel in her voice, sharp and angry, but her touch is soft. “Riko-” her voice stumbles here, caught up in sadness and memories of Seth, “Riko is a monster.” When she crouches down to his eye level, staring unflinchingly into his face, the feeling ( _familypackhome_ ) in his chest feels like it might strangle him. “You’re not a monster just because of what you _are_ , Neil. It’s what you do.”

“Besides,” and now Dan’s fingers are in his hair, soothing. It reminds him of another lifetime, when he was a young boy and had a mother who loved him. “You’re a Fox. That’s all that matters to us.”

Tears don’t come, but they threaten to.

(Later, Renee ghosts her fingers across his face and tells him mournfully “Maybe you and I have more in common than either of us thought.” He presses his face against the palm of her hand and he inhales the memories of the other girls that didn’t make it, of the far between gentle times of his childhood, and he gets it. Renee smells like memories.

“You’re-”

She smiles at him. “Yes.”

It all makes sense now, the wrongness of her scent, the way she existed as pieces of all of them and none of her own. _Not everyone makes it out of that life alive_ , she’d told him. “Does Andrew know?”

“He suspects.” It makes sense then, why something like Renee would have been drawn to Andrew; he had death painted up and down both arms.)

* * *

They take him to a cabin in the mountains that smells like fresh air and his family and nothing else, and they don’t ask him questions it would be too painful to answer (halfway into the drive, Nicky turns on the radio and plays _Hungry Like the Wolf_ at full volume).

He’s treated to soft couches and no judgments for an entire day, and then Renee takes the car to go rescue Jean. He hates the way that the same tug he feels around his teammates, the pull in his chest that drives him to their side, urges him to get in the car and go with her – he buries the feeling in hot breath against Andrew’s neck until the only thing that matters is the way that Andrew lets him curl tight around him in his sleep.

(He pops the stitches in his hands against Aaron’s face that last afternoon when Aaron accuses him of being a monster taking advantage of an easy target. Blood blossoms up from the myriad cuts that threaten to tear him apart at the edges, and all he can do is laugh.

Nothing about this is _easy_.)

* * *

After that, they never let him leave the tower without something to remind him of what he is – he wears Matt’s scarf to his first day back at classes. He wears a shirt of Dan’s beneath his team jacket the day after that. They slowly work bits and pieces of orange and other people’s scents into his every waking moment, until he can’t even breathe without a hundred tiny reminders.

He is a Fox.

* * *

He’s not surprised when Moriyama (the younger, the new leader) comes for him; after everything that’s happened, it’s long past time that the main branch took notice of him. Ichirou looks at him with the same disdain Riko had – he smells like salt air and white sand, and it makes him easier to deal with. “I just want to be left alone,” he tells the older man; he’s _tired_. He’s never wanted part of the crime empire, of the werewolf hierarchy. He doesn’t even want fame and fortune. He just wants the Foxes, and he just wants to play.

He knows that he’s a loose end, a dangerous variable that needs to be erased from the equation, so it surprises him when Ichirou makes his threats with words instead of fangs.

“No.”

The single word takes them both by surprise – Ichirou is not used to be told so, and Neil certainly hadn’t intended to. It slips out like a sneeze, unbidden, but there’s no way to take it back. “No, I won’t join. Anything. I’m a Fox.”

“You are a-”

“I am _not yours_ ,” he snarls, and he doesn’t realize the shift has come on until Ichirou mirrors it; the only comfort is the sharp tang of shock in the air – he genuinely hadn’t known. “The fact that you didn’t even know there was a lost werewolf running around for the past _nine_ _years_ means I’m not a liability. I’m not a threat to our kind.” Against all odds, Ichirou nods his head in agreement. Most young wolves – the newly turned, regardless of age – lack the control to pass among the world of man. It had taken heavy beatings and constant desperation for Neil to get himself here. “The one who turned me is dead. You cannot force me to submit.”

Ichirou’s features bleed back into the smoothness of humanity. Neil follows after, just as quickly, but with less finesse. “Wolves that run without packs are dangerous,” he says slowly. There’s no way to read what he might be thinking.

Neil shrugs. “I have a pack.” He watches the slight widening of eyes as Ichirou smells the truth on him. “Let us play. We’re worth more to you alive and happy.”

There is silence for long minutes, too long, and Neil starts counting the number of heartbeats thinking any one could be his last; he didn’t tell any of the others where he was going. He didn’t say goodbye. If he never makes it home again, they might think he’d run (and that’s the thought that spurs him to survive. They have to know that he would never willingly leave them, not again). “You have never revealed yourself on the court.” Ichirou does not question. He observes.

“No,” Neil tells him again. He’s fast and he’s scrappy, but he plays entirely human; it had never even crossed his mind to play any other way. It’s kept him alive all these years – he never drew attention from the Moriyamas or their Butcher until he met Riko (and that feud, like everything else, could have been ordinary).

“If you do-”

He hears agreement in the words, and he doesn’t need to hear anything else. “I’ll be dead. I know.”

Ichirou lets him go.

He’s _free_.

* * *

He gets back to the Tower ( _home_ , he feels it thrumming in his veins. _Home_ ) and immediately goes to Andrew; he doesn’t say anything, just curls himself as close as is allowed and immerses himself in his senses. His heartbeat slows to match Andrew’s, beat for beat. The scent of warm guns and wheatgrass slowly seeps in. By the time Andrew has acknowledged his presence, Neil has gone slow and sleepy beside him. “Stop.”

“Hmm?” There’s a weightlessness to his body that he’s never felt before; it’s the exact weight of the target that’s been removed.

Andrew narrows his eyes. “Stop looking at me like that,” he growls; his voice is rough from cigarette smoke and cold air, but is otherwise warm (it’s the same way he says _I hate you_ and _Stay_ ). “I’m not your fucking answer.” Beneath them, the lights of the parking lot reflect the stars in the sky, above and below, and for a moment of time Neil would swear they sit at the edge of a cosmic abyss. Somehow over the past months, in all their quiet corner conversations and whatever it is that Andrew gets up to in the hours he doesn’t sleep, he’s managed to learn as much about this world – Neil’s world. Renee’s world. Maybe his world now, too – as Neil does. “This isn’t some mystic destiny. The idea that werewolves mate for life is ridiculous.”

“They don’t,” Neil agrees, as he tangles his fist into the neon orange of Andrew’s sweatshirt – JOSTEN, it says on the back. 10. A smile tugs the corners of his lips the same way he tugs himself closer. “Foxes do.”

Andrew kisses him desperately, savagely, all teeth like he’s trying to bite his way inside. “Shut up,” he snarls against Neil’s lips, and he pulls him closer. “Shut the fuck up.”

* * *

They play their final match like they have everything to lose, and the score is tied in the final seconds – it feels too much like defeat, and he’s _tired_ , he’s so tired. Neil hears the buzzer and that’s it, that’s _it_ –

The buzzer sounds again.

The crowd is a roar at his back, desperately screaming a mix of obscenities and incredulity, and he hears Dan’s yelling louder than anything. She lets out a noise that sounds wounded at first, and finally turns up into a win. Allison leaps into Matt’s arms as Neil drops to the court, and he finally understands. First buzz, check.

Second buzz, mate.

Kevin has scored in the last possible second, and the Foxes have taken the victory. In the split second of time between realization and reality, Neil doesn’t spare a thought for the VIP box or the men who sit in it. He doesn’t spare a thought for the crowds. He is aware, distantly, that the Ravens are still on the court, but for the first time in his life it’s not suspicion or sports on his mind – it’s contentment. Neil is content.

He catches a whiff of burnt rubber and turpentine, turned sour by sweat and rage, before he catches movement from the corner of his gaze. Andrew plants himself like a shield between them, and brings his racquet down onto Riko’s arm without mercy. It doesn’t take a werewolf to hear the way the bones shatter.

Riko screams, and it hits him low in his gut like a punch. “Andrew,” he grunts, sounding winded as he had that first day, that first meeting; Andrew knocked him completely off his equilibrium, and he’s never regained it. He actually thinks he might vomit. In the middle of a court at the end of a game he claims to care nothing about, Andrew had placed himself between a mafia’s second son and a werewolf without a second thought. When he turns, face blank, it’s like Neil finally knows the question he was supposed to be looking to an answer for all those times. “Four hundred percent.”

Andrew grins.

(Later, in the locker room, he tugs Neil’s mouth to his by the collar of his uniform. _I hate you,_ he licks against the roof of his mouth. _I hate you_.

He smells sour, and he tastes like home.)


End file.
